Speaking to a meeting of the Organized Crime Council on Tuesday, Sessions blamed open borders and lax immigration enforcement for the growth of the crime gang, which was founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s by Central American immigrants mostly from El Salvador.

He said his Justice Department would have “zero tolerance” for the gang violence.
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Members of MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, are known for their violent methods and fierce gang loyalty. According to the National Gang Intelligence Center, MS-13 has more than 10,000 members in the United States, and more than 30,000 worldwide.

Donald Trump signed an executive order shortly after taking office in which he asked the Justice Department to convene a working group to go after transnational criminal organizations like MS-13, whose formal name is Mara Salvatrucha. They have been based mainly in El Salvador since 1990 when there was a wave of deportations from the United States, and many in the criminal hierarchy set up shop in the troubled Central American nation.

El Salvador’s Attorney General’s Office arrested José Adán Salazar Umaña, alias “Chepe Diablo,” the alleged leader of the Texis Cartel, the most important drug trafficking and money laundering organization in the country. The arrest raises new questions about the links between Salazar Umaña and powerful politicians in El Salvador, including current Vice President Óscar Ortiz.

Salazar Umaña was arrested at noon on April 4 during a police operation that involved raids on some 50 properties, including hotels, gas stations and shops that either belong to Chepe Diablo or his associates. According to the authorities, the companies were used by the Texis Cartel to evade taxes or launder money that came from illegal activities.

According to InSight Crime’s report, Óscar Ortiz was allegedly laundering money through real estate transactions going back to 2000. Read the full article here.

But the bigger favor is the one he’s done for Central America, particularly the “northern triangle” states of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Those nations, plus Mexico, in varying degrees, are in a demographic death spiral, losing too many people in prime working years they cannot afford to lose. Their window of development is getting narrow, a UCLA professor of economics explained to me. The statistics here show that by 2025, the fertility rate will be just 2.08% for the region as a whole, which is at or below replacement rate. The years following will be below replacement rate. Immigration, which primarily involves young people in their prime working years, has been a disaster for those countries, as has been their government’s dependence on remittances. There is not just a negative effect of dollars coming in to displace local productivity; there is also a social cost as families are broken up by migration. In fact, the IMF has pointed out that remittances tend to keep a country artificially underdeveloped. The money itself tends to benefit government cronies and make corruption less costly.

So let’s not kid ourselves as to what has happened. Trump’s statements and tweets have spared Americans billions in costs associated with illegal immigrants. But they have spared Central Americans the near fatal cost of unchecked emigration.

Just the other day I posted on how Mexico is spending US$50million on legal aid for immigrants to fight deportation in the U.S., since the country makes more money from Mexicans who leave the country than from those who stay.

Besides MS-13, police in Long Island say that they also have to contend with a number of other street gangs, including the Latin Kings, Netas and Sureños, that are all actively recruiting new members in suburban areas like Riverhead, Central Islip, Huntington Station and other neighborhoods with established Central American communities.

MS-13, however, seems to be the most worrisome to both law enforcement and Central American immigrants who dealt with the gang’s brutal tactics in their home nations.

The gang was founded more than two decades ago in southern California by immigrants fleeing El Salvador’s civil war. Its founders took lessons learned from the bloody conflict to the streets of Los Angeles, all the while building a reputation as one of the most ruthless and sophisticated street gangs in the country.
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The gang now has a large presence in New York, Southern California, Washington D.C. and many rural areas on the East coast with substantial Salvadoran populations.

Authorities in El Salvador dismantled a MS13 network allegedly dedicated to forcing women into marriages before assassinating the husband to collect insurance money, a scheme that speaks to the gang’s growing business sophistication.

According to the report by the Civil Society Roundtable Against Forced Displacement by Violence and Organized Crime in El Salvador (Observatorio de la Mesa de Sociedad Civil contra el Desplazamiento Forzado por Violencia y Crimen Organizado en El Salvador) — which is comprised of ten non-governmental organizations — the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) was responsible for about a third of the forced displacements caused by the gangs, while their rivals in the Barrio 18 accounted for another third.

In many cases, however, it appears that researchers were unable to determine the gang responsible or the victims were unwilling to provide that information.

The police accounted for six percent of the displacements, followed by the military with two percent.

In what has become Latin America’s most violent country, InSight crime states, the MS13 and Barrio 18 have engaged on turf wars for several years, and

The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 47,214 migrants along the southwest U.S. border in November, an increase of 44% compared with November 2015. It was the Border Patrol’s busiest month since June of 2014, when illegal entries from Central America were cresting.

Over the past six months, Border Patrol agents have caught nearly 240,000 migrants, an average of more than 1,300 a day—30% more than the same period a year earlier.

The two videos — obtained by Factum, El Faro and InSight Crime — show members of the ruling Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional – FMLN) party — which has controlled El Salvador’s government since 2009 — meeting with leaders of the MS13 and the two factions of the Barrio 18 gang, and pledging to provide millions of dollars in aid to the gang members.

The videos, which were taken surreptitiously, clearly show the faces of current Interior Minister Aristides Valencia and former Congressman Benito Lara, who was later security minister between June 2014 and January 2016, and has since become a presidential adviser on security- and gang-related matters.

The emergence of the videos comes just months after El Faro revealed an audio recording in which Valencia discussed with gangs a secret electoral pact for the second round of the 2014 presidential elections. The former FMLN guerrilla commander turned politician Salvador Sánchez Cerén won that election by a narrow margin.

Video,

At one point in the video, a gang leader reads a document, which appears to be outlining the plan Valencia refers to. The document states that the micro-credit fund would be used by the gangs to create companies, and that the responsible body to decide who would lend money would be a “credit committee.”

Valencia then explains that the gang members would be the actual committee

The State Department would not say how much the agency paid for the polling in Haiti. The polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, was paid nearly $4 million for political polling in the 2014 campaign cycle, almost entirely by Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Stan Greenberg, the research firm’s chairman and CEO, served as Clinton’s pollster during his 1992 run for president.